The Open Science platform is a gateway to the services, tools and resources necessary to streamline engagement and participation of CiBB researchers in Responsible Research within an Open Science framework. It primarily focuses on three key perspectives: Open Access publishing, Open Research Data and Ethics & Open Data, following CiBB’s Research Data Management (RDM) internal policy.
Open Access (OA) publishing
Open Access (OA) is a set of principles and practices, through which research outputs are made available online, free of access charges or other barriers, notably barriers to copying or reuse. In the context of publishing, CiBB follows the current EC policies and mandates.
In short, all peer-reviewed scientific publications should be made available in Open Access, i.e., publications should be made freely available online, immediately upon publication and with no restrictions on use, by depositing them on a trustworthy repository.
Within these requirements, researchers are free to decide where to publish and to choose the OA publishing model:
– Gold OA: the publisher makes all articles and related content available for free immediately on the journal's website. Articles are licensed for sharing and reuse via Creative Commons licenses or similar. As a rule, article-processing charges (APC) of Gold OA are an eligible cost under public-funded projects.
– Green OA: also known as self-archiving, it is independent from publication by the publisher: authors (also) deposit the apposite version of their work in a trustworthy open repository, e.g., an institutional or independent central one. The University of Coimbra (UC) has its own digital repository under a CC BY 4.0 license - Estudo Geral, an Open AIRE provider, where CiBB researchers should always deposit either the author accepted manuscript (AAM) or the version of record (VoR) of their peer-reviewed publications. As a rule, self-archiving is mandatory for all peer-reviewed publications arising from public-funded projects. This means that authors must retain the AAM or VoR copyrights under a CC BY license to be able to self-archive their publications.
– Hybrid OA: this is the model followed by subscription-based journals that also provide open access for those individual articles for which the authors (or research sponsor) pay an extra publication fee. Since hybrid OA journals are not considered to meet the open access mandate, the associated APCs are not an eligible cost under public-funded projects.
Open Research Data (ORD)
ORD refers to the data underpinning scientific research results that has no restrictions on its access, enabling anyone to access it. ORD should be implemented in light of the FAIR Data Principles (DOI: 10.1038/sdata.2016.18), which aim to make scientific data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable. It is an integral part of Research Data Management (RDM), and requires both researchers and their institutional supporting facilities to take steps throughout the entire scientific process to curate, preserve and/or archive the data produced/collected, for potential re-use by themselves and others.
In general terms, while research is ongoing, data should be stored privately and backed up regularly on internal servers (with multiple levels of redundancy).
Upon completion and publication of results, non-sensitive data and other digital material (including any software developed for the purposes of analysis or support) will be deposited in an OA trustworthy repository (e.g., the general-purpose ZENODO, GitHub for software, or any discipline-based, FAIR-compliant repository the researchers deem more appropriate for the specific data in question).
Researchers should ensure that the chosen repository has the necessary open licenses available (e.g., CC0 and CC BY or similar, for public-funded projects), assigns a persistent unique identifier (e.g., a DOI or Handle) to the deposited data and that those identifiers are included in the scientific publications they support.
Whether data is afterwards publicly shared or not (see data protection), preserving it is essential to research integrity and reproducibility of results. Hence, long-term preservation of high-quality data (including sensitive data) should be ensured either in local servers or in repositories allowing for it (e.g., ZENODO, which also provides restricted access protocols).
Ethics & Open Data
Openness is but one aspect of Research Integrity, duly balanced against the research ethics standards and regulations in force. The majority of research data – even sensitive data involving human subjects/samples – can be ethically and legally shared, provided the appropriate ethical considerations are observed, including (but not limited to):
– Data protection: To avert the possible sources of harm to the human participants if such data was to be disclosed. Hence, management and processing of sensitive data (e.g., clinical/personal data) must comply with the regulations in force (notably, the EU GDPR), which typically restrict access to it. In such cases, FAIR data sharing dictates that one must make it clear and transparent if and how this data can be accessed, by whom and under which conditions. CiBB/UC feature data protection office(r)s to support/supervise handling of sensitive data.
– Intellectual Property (IP) protection: Researchers have an ethical responsibility to protect their results (and data), provided that a) such results can reasonably be expected to be commercially or industrially exploited, and b) protecting them is possible, reasonable and justified (given the circumstances). They must duly examine this possibility and adequately protect the research outputs in question before or instead of disclosing them. CiBB features a Technology Transfer specialized team that provides support on theses matters.
– Legal and professional regulations and standards to which researchers should always comply: Following the FAIR principles, information on the ethical issues that concern the chosen research topic (e.g. ethical governance procedures, informed consent, anonymization, controlled access to the data and withdrawal from research), must be disclosed along with the methods and data. Relevant regulations and standards for CiBB researchers include:
- the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR),
- Decreto-Lei 80/2018 (revision of Decreto-Lei nr. 97/95) regarding Clinical Research Ethics Committees,
- ICMJE’s Recommendations for the conduct, reporting, editing, and publication of scholarly work,
- UC's Code of Ethics, Conduct and Integrity,
- The EU Code of Conduct for Research Integrity published by ALLEA.
